61–70 of 190 posts
That aside, I think longevity-skepticism is still mostly adaptive. I haven't seen any concrete progress and the people who are true believers are a. getting their hopes up and b. tend to be really gullible/easy to manipulate. We should ideally be skeptical enough to avoid those traps but hopeful enough to pursue genuinely promising research.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.
Endeavor to touch and see everything. Therein, you'll discover quite a lot about you and all else.
A funny thing I realized: immortality is incompatible with spending a nonzero fraction of my life with children. I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal, this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100% of my life. You may think I could start again every 100…
Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance tax, you can imagine they don't intend…
it's kinda weird that you think modern capitalism/mode of wealth is a harder problem to solve than literal immortality I'll take eternal life even if Putin gets it, thanks
> Bryan Johnson is an interesting case here. If you take the longevity project to its logical end, you get someone who's stopped living in order to keep living - for the most part not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous, all in service of more years. I never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds happy as a…
My hope for anyone who dedicates their lives to this kind of work are able to let go if they reach their deathbed without a solution, because if they can't, that would be a deeply painful way to leave this world.
Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes. I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a de…
As I said in another comment, I'm against immortality because old people need to make way for new generations. But this comment is cute. I like the idea that we'd be there and we're able to see how people are doing, but we're not influencing the world anymore. Though I could also imagine at some point it could become depressing in bad times when there's nothing you can do, or boring after tens of thousands of years o…
It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.
Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes. I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a de…
It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]
Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.
0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift. I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place , Sandman , and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons…
Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build strength.
Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be better to stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If anyone said we should start doing this to all our children, they'd be run out of town.
If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.
"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish." -- The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin